Editor’s note: The video of this event has been removed as of May 2010, per contract agreement.
Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers, Blink, The Tipping Point and his newest book What the Dog Saw, headlined the closing LegalTech keynote on Wednesday. The session was titled “I3: The New Convergence of Intelligence, Intuition and Information,” and was sponsored by Thomson Reuters. Gladwell also has been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 1996.
Also speaking on the panel was Dr. Lisa Sanders, internist, columnist for The New York Times and author of Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis, and medical advisor to the Fox television series House. Sanders also is an assistant clinical professor at the Yale University School of Medicine and a clinician educator in Yale’s Primary Care Internal Medicine Residency program.
David Craig, chief strategy officer for Thomson Reuters, opened the discussion and moderated the event.
The ballroom at the New York Hilton was packed as Craig set the tone by describing the “tsunami of information” inundating professionals across the globe.
“Everyone here knows from personal experience how the amount of information has exploded in the last twenty years,” said Craig. “But not only are we creating more information, we are also storing and sharing it. Corporations and organizations are responsible for a third of this information – banking records, personal medical records, research reports, news. And the expectation is that there is an answer online for every question. Legal professionals ran two billion searches against the Westlaw databases in 2009. This was an increase of 45% percent from the year before.”
Gladwell reflected that it wasn’t the lack of information that left the United States unprepared for the Pearl Harbor attack on Dec. 7, 1941 – the United States had broken the Japanese code; it was the U.S. military’s over-abundance of information that left it unable to “see the forest for the trees.”
As part of her comments, Sanders further defined the information explosion as she recreated how doctors bombard themselves with information to solve difficult problems. She described a real-life House experience as a medical team tried to diagnose a dying woman. Despite 20 pages of test results and information, the primary doctor still couldn’t determine why the patient was jaundiced and why her vital organs were shutting down. What saved the woman was a doctor who reviewed the results and stepped back from the information to look for the connections.
Gladwell remarked that intuition is rooted in the unconscious, “drawing from the reserves of knowledge,” he said. Unaided expert decision-making is fragile, easily infected by biases. Gladwell pointed to a Kasparov chess challenge in which both opponents used a computer throughout the match. Kasparov saw that the computer’s quick analysis of every possible move enabled these grandmasters to let their experience, creativity and knowledge come through.
John Bringardner recaps the session here on Law.com and Jason Wilson offers up “Gladwell, Sanders & Craig: LTNY 2010 Last Keynote in Tweets” on his blog.
After the presentation, we asked Monica Bay, editor-in-chief of Law Technology News, for her impressions of the discussion in this video clip:
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